Serving the Reich

by Philip Ball

  Stark’s situation was so close to Lenard’s that it is no wonder the two men forged a firm alliance. Like Lenard, Stark was an experimentalist befuddled by the mathematical complexity that had recently entered physics. He was another extreme nationalist whose right-wing views had been hardened by the First World War. He too felt that Einstein had stolen his ideas, this time over the quantum-mechanical description of light-driven chemical reactions. (Stark never in fact fully accepted quantum theory, even though an understanding of the ‘Stark effect’ depended on it.) And being a mediocrity who struck lucky, he found himself being passed over for academic appointments to which he was convinced he had the best claim. He attributed this to the self-interest of a ‘Jewish and pro-Semitic circle’ centred on the (decidedly Aryan) Planck and Sommerfeld, the latter being the alleged cabal’s ‘enterprising business manager’.*4 This circle included most of Sommerfeld’s students, not least Peter Debye, who was given the professorship at Göttingen in 1914 for which Stark had applied. Lenard’s and Stark’s enemies suggested that their definition of ‘Jewish science’ was more or less anything that the two physicists could not understand, and that they placed in the ‘Jewish cabal’ anyone who threatened to outclass them scientifically. But Einstein was undoubtedly perceived as the ringleader of the whole affair.

  By 1922 the situation had deteriorated to such a degree that Einstein declined to speak at a session of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in Leipzig, fearing that his life might be in danger. This wasn’t paranoia. In June the Jewish foreign minister of the Weimar government Walther Rathenau, who Einstein knew well, was assassinated in Berlin by two ultra-nationalist army officers. Lenard had refused to lower the flag of his institute at Heidelberg as a mark of respect for the murdered minister, and as a result he had been dragged from his laboratory by an angry mob of students. Lenard narrowly escaped being thrown into the River Neckar, but the distressing experience only deepened his anti-Semitism. When he was reprimanded by the university, he announced his resignation in disgust. He soon withdrew it when he discovered that the shortlist for his replacement consisted of two ‘non-Aryans’—James Franck and Gustav Hertz,*5 who had won the Nobel Prize together in 1925—and an experimentalist sympathetic to England, Hans Geiger, who had worked with Rutherford in Manchester. In the end Lenard clung on at Heidelberg until 1929, when he was replaced by Walther Bothe. Lenard’s colleagues made Bothe’s life so miserable, however, that he moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Lenard so dominated the physics institute at Heidelberg that it was named after him in 1935.

  Laue spoke on relativity in Einstein’s place at the 1922 conference, earning the abiding enmity of the ‘Aryan physicists’. His audience was supplied with pamphlets distributed by Stark decrying this ‘Jewish theory’.

  When, in the following year, the National Socialists took up arms in Munich to openly challenge the complacent decadence of the Weimar government and free Germany from the Jewish stranglehold, Lenard and Stark recognized a kindred spirit and a hope for the future. In May 1924 they wrote an article called ‘The Hitler spirit and science’. Hitler and his comrades, they said,

  appear to us as God’s gifts from times of old when races were purer, people were greater, and minds were less deluded . . . He is here. He has revealed himself as the Führer of the sincere. We shall follow him.

  The Nazi leader noted this pledge of support, and he and Rudolf Hess visited Lenard at home in 1926.

  Stark was in fact the author of his own exclusion from the academic community. Slighted by the opposition from his colleagues at Würzburg to his acceptance of a Habilitation thesis from his student Ludwig Glaser—Glaser’s study of the optical properties of porcelain was regarded as mere engineering, not true science—Stark petulantly resigned from his professorship in 1922. He set up a private laboratory in a nearby disused porcelain factory, using the money from his Nobel Prize to fund this industrial venture (which was against the Nobel Foundation’s rules). At the same time he channelled his resentment against academia generally and theoretical physics in particular into a book called The Present Crisis in German Physics. Glaser, as we saw, had already embraced his mentor’s philosophy and became a vocal propagandist of Aryan physics. He was appointed assistant to the undistinguished engineer Wilhelm Müller, Sommerfeld’s politically favoured successor at Munich (see page 103). But Glaser was so virulently racist that he became a liability and was subsequently moved out of harm’s way to the fringes of the Reich—Poland and then Prague—where he thankfully fades from history.

  By the late 1920s Stark’s porcelain venture had failed, and he tried to regain an academic post but was repeatedly passed over in favour of more able candidates. When Sommerfeld opposed his application for a professorship at Munich, this confirmed in Stark’s mind that Sommerfeld was a spider in the Jewish web.

  How Aryans created science

  For Stark and Lenard, the canker at the core of German physics was not merely the nepotism of the Jews and their lackeys, nor the obscure theories and unpatriotic internationalism of Einstein. The fundamental problem lay with a foreign and degenerate approach to science itself. The popular notion that science has a universal nature and spirit, they said, is quite wrong. In an article titled ‘National Socialism and Science’, Stark wrote in 1934 that science, like any other creative activity, ‘is conditioned by the spiritual and characterological endowments of its practitioners’. Jews did science differently from true Germans. Echoing Lenard’s fantasy, Stark claimed that while Aryans preferred to pursue an experimental physics rooted in tangible reality, the Jews wove webs of abstruse theory disconnected from experience. ‘Respect for facts and aptitude for exact observation’, he wrote,

  reside in the Nordic race. The spirit of the German enables him to observe things outside himself exactly as they are, without the interpolation of his own ideas and wishes, and his body does not shrink from the effort which the investigation of nature demands of him. The German’s love of nature and his aptitude for natural science are based on this endowment. Thus it is understandable that natural science is overwhelmingly a creation of the Nordic—Germanic blood component of the Aryan peoples.

  Just look, Stark implores his readers, at all the great scientists whose portraits are presented in Lenard’s Grosse Naturforscher (Great Investigators of Nature; 1929): nearly all have ‘Nordic—Germanic’ features (even, apparently, Italians like Galileo).

  In contrast, the Jewish spirit in science ‘is focused upon its own ego, its own conception, and its self-interest’. The Jew is innately driven to ‘mix facts and imputations topsy-turvy in the endeavour to secure the court decision he desires’. Of course, the Jew can imitate the Nordic style to produce occasional noteworthy results, but not ‘authentic creative work’. The Jew suppresses facts that don’t suit him, and turns theory into dogma. He is a masterly self-publicist, courting and seducing the press and the public—just look at Einstein.

  What Germany needs, then, is a truly German, ‘Aryan physics’ (Deutsche Physik) that rejects the overly mathematical fabulations of relativistic physics in favour of a rigorously experimental approach. And in a formula calculated to ingratiate him to the new leaders, Stark adds that

  The scientist . . . does not exist only for himself or even for his science. Rather, in his work he must serve the nation first and foremost. For these reasons, the leading scientific positions in the National Socialist state are to be occupied not by elements alien to the Volk but only by nationally conscious German men.

  While the Aryan physicists were incapable of mounting a credible assault on Einstein’s relativity in scientific terms, Deutsche Physik offered a new line of attack: relativity threatened to undermine the very essence of the Germanic world view. Incorrectly claiming that relativity ‘sets aside the concept of energy’, the Nazi mathematician Bruno Thüring asserted that in this aspect one can see ‘something concerning the soul, world-feeling, attitudes and racial dispositi
ons’. Einstein, he said, is not the successor of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler (the canonical Nordic—Germanic scientist) and Newton, but their ‘determined opponent’:

  His theory is not the keystone of a development, but a declaration of total war, waged with the purpose of destroying what lies at the basis of this development, namely, the world view of German man . . . This theory could have blossomed and flourished nowhere else but in the soil of Marxism, whose scientific expression it is, in a manner analogous to that of cubism in the plastic arts and the unmelodies and unharmonic atonality in the music of the last several years [‘degenerate science’!]. Thus, in its consequences the theory of relativity appears to be less a scientific than a political problem.

  These ideas were noted and initially welcomed by Hitler. ‘That which is called the crisis of science’, he wrote,

  is nothing more than that the gentlemen are beginning to see on their own how they have gotten on to the wrong track with their objectivity and autonomy. The simple question that precedes every scientific enterprise is: who is it who wants to know something, who is it who wants to orient himself in the world around him? It follows necessarily that there can only be the science of a particular type of humanity and of a particular age. There is very likely a Nordic science, and a National Socialist science, which are bound to be opposed to the Liberal—Jewish science, which, indeed, is no longer fulfilling its function anywhere, but is in the process of nullifying itself.

  Such declarations can scarcely leave one with an impression that the Nazis had much sympathy for—or understanding of—true science. But neither should they be read as some kind of official doctrine that guided the Nazi government’s policy on scientific research. Frequently, Hitler’s grandiose statements—on this or other matters—had as little real influence on the way affairs were conducted at the daily, prosaic level as do the proclamations of the Pope on the dealings of a local Catholic church. Indeed, Hitler purposely maintained a distance between his own views and edicts and their practical implementation. The actual response of the National Socialist authorities to Deutsche Physik was not uncritical acceptance but something rather more complex.

  Deutsche Physik under the Nazis

  The anti-Einstein activism of Stark, Lenard and their fellow travellers continued through the early 1930s. In 1931 a hundred scientists and philosophers contributed to a volume denouncing Einstein and his theories. A few supporters, such as Laue and Walther Nernst, defended him publicly against such onslaughts. But typically his champions would stick up for his theories while avoiding the delicate ‘political’ matter of his Jewishness.

  When Hitler became Reich chancellor, the Deutsche Physiker must have felt that their moment had come. And so it seemed—at first. Stark was made president of the prestigious Physical and Technical Institute of the German Reich (PTR) in Berlin in 1933, giving him new pretensions of power. He announced that the PTR would thenceforth take charge of all German scientific periodicals, and at the meeting of the DPG in Würzburg in September 1933 it seemed to Laue that Stark was trying to anoint himself Führer of all German physics. In his opening address as chairman, Laue publicly challenged the Aryan physicists by making an implicit comparison between the theory of relativity and the condemnation of Galileo’s Copernican theory by the Catholic Church. Invoking the (apocryphal) story that Galileo had muttered ‘eppur si muove’ (‘still [the earth] moves’) as he rose after kneeling to hear his sentence, Laue made it clear that Einstein’s theory would remain true whatever his detractors might assert.

  Here once more, Laue’s courage in defying Nazi demagoguery and interference was very rare among the physicists. ‘To all of us minor figures’, Paul Ewald wrote later, ‘the very existence of a man of Laue’s stature and bearing was an enormous comfort.’ His resistance was not without a certain panache: he was said never to go out of doors without carrying a parcel under each arm, since that gave him an excuse not to give the obligatory Hitler salute in greeting. Laue was one of the very few scientists in prominent positions to move beyond private grumbles and little acts of defiance into open admission of his contempt for the Nazis. And unlike Planck, he came to recognize that scientists could not remain ‘apolitical’. In 1933 he was among those who chided Einstein for his activism, warning him that ‘political battles call for different methods and purposes from scientific research’ and that as a result scientists rarely fared well in that arena. But by and by he saw that one could not simply stand aloof from National Socialism. Indeed, he implied to Einstein that he stayed in Germany only because his loathing of the Nazis made him desperate to see their downfall. ‘I hate them so much I must be close to them’, he told Einstein during a visit to the United States in 1937. ‘I have to go back.’ After the war, James Franck said that Laue

  was not a daredevil, blinded against peril by vitality and good nerves; he was rather a sensitive and even a nervous man who never underestimated the risk he ran in opposing Nazidom. He was forced into this line of conduct because he could bear the danger thus incurred better than he could have borne passive acceptance of a government whose immorality and cruelty he despised.

  When we hear it said in defence of German physicists that not all men can be heroes, we should bear this remark in mind: it is not a matter of how strong your backbone is, but of how much your personal sense of morality can tolerate.

  Thanks in considerable measure to Laue—but perhaps still more to infighting among the National Socialists—Stark’s attempt to rule German physics came to nothing. He could, however, at least impose his views on the PTR, where he instigated the Führer principle and sacked all Jews from the advisory committee. The following year he was appointed president of the German Research Foundation, which controlled much of the funding for science, and he promptly withdrew funds for work in theoretical physics. (Because of a shift of political power, Stark fell from grace and was forced to retire from this post two years later, whereupon funds for theoretical physics were restored.)

  Prompted by Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, in the summer of 1934 Stark wrote to all eleven of his fellow Nobel laureates in Germany asking them to sign a letter declaring that

  In Adolf Hitler we German natural researchers perceive and admire the saviour and leader of the German people. Under his protection and encouragement, our scientific work will serve the German people and increase German esteem in the world.

  This quasi-religious statement found no takers, although the refusals were carefully crafted. Heisenberg, for example, told Stark that he agreed with the sentiments but felt it inappropriate for scientists to make public pronouncements on political matters. That was not just a convenient excuse but a genuine statement of belief, which cut both ways: Heisenberg seemed to apply it equally to Stark’s infantile gesture and to questions of moral responsibility.

  Stark and Lenard fretted about the KWG, which seemed to them to be decidedly lax about expelling its Jewish members—no doubt, they were convinced, because it was dominated by an Einsteinian cabal. ‘From the beginning’, Lenard wrote in 1936, ‘it was . . . a Jewish monstrosity with the purpose, entirely unknown to the emperor and his advisers, of enabling Jews to buy themselves respectability and of bringing Jews and their friends and similar spirits into comfortable and influential positions as “researchers”.’ Starting now to ramble inanely, Lenard proclaimed that the society’s president Planck was ‘so ignorant about race that he took Einstein to be a real German’, doubtless because of the many theologians and pastors in Planck’s family and their misguided respect for the Old Testament.

  Stark and Lenard had hoped to set the society straight when Planck’s first term of office came to an end in 1933: ‘to make something sensible of this completely Jewish business’, wrote Stark, ‘which, as a start, must simply be pulled to pieces’. But Planck did not retire; he stayed for a second term of office. When that was due to expire in March 1936, Stark felt sure he would be called upon as the new president. Inexplicably, he wasn’t. (Bernhard Rust,
who was now able to dictate the society’s affairs at the Reich Education Ministry, distrusted Stark, who had aligned himself with Rust’s political opponents in Nazi circles.) Well then, said Stark, it must be Lenard. Rust approved of that idea, but now Lenard himself declined, saying he was too old. No other successor was put forward, and meanwhile Planck stayed on.

  It was a delicate moment, since the Aryan physicists weren’t alone in regarding the KWG as ideologically suspect. After the society’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations in January 1936, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter called it a ‘playground for Catholics, Socialists and Jews’, while the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps had portrayed it as a ‘restricted circle’ basking in elitist ‘aristocratic splendour’. Planck knew that Rust would not endorse a replacement who was too closely associated with Einstein, and would prefer someone known to be faithful to the party. The minister would also insist that the organization now adopt the Führer principle. But the KWG senate cannily identified a candidate who, as an industrialist, could retain some independence from political influence, while as a staunch patriot should be unobjectionable to the leaders: the chemistry Nobel laureate Carl Bosch. He was duly elected in 1937. But in place of the secretary Friedrich Glum, Rust appointed the Nazi official Ernst Telschow, who had some chemical training and had worked briefly under Otto Hahn. As Bosch was frequently plagued by illness, Telschow took over much of the society’s practical business. Arguably this was no bad thing for the KWG, for Telschow was a canny administrator, able to form links with the Nazi regime that would benefit the society. One of those individuals who knew how to adapt to the prevailing political climate, Telschow was active in the (renamed) society after the war and was finally elected a senator in 1967.